{"id":2370,"date":"2009-07-13T13:48:46","date_gmt":"2009-07-13T20:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=2370"},"modified":"2009-07-13T13:48:46","modified_gmt":"2009-07-13T20:48:46","slug":"humor-as-a-guide-to-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2009\/07\/13\/humor-as-a-guide-to-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Humor as a Guide to Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at the optimizer’s blog<\/a>, quantum computing’s younger clown<\/a> discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory<\/a> (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2<\/sub> and H2<\/sub>+<\/sup> (which was rather challenging considering I’d only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave talks about their work. I was last to go. In my talk, I drew (transparencies, you know) a cartoon of “photon man” (wavy line stick figure) who explained the difference between two photon absorption and absorbing two photons. No one reacted to these cartoons during the talk. But at the end of the talk, one of the other interns, trying to be cute asked me “So, what does photon man think about all of this?” I paused. Thought for a second. And replied “He was very enlight<\/em>ened by the whole thing!” The simultaneous groan emitted by the audience (who had sat through 8 straight talks) was, I must say, awesome. I have a vivid memory of my adviser in the back of the room giving a hearty actual laugh! And I have been hooked on trying to insert at least one bad joke in every talk I have given ever since.
\nSince I enjoy humor in talks, lately I’ve been wondering if there isn’t an easier way to make funnier talks. The optimizers list<\/a> is a good start, but I’m lazy. Which led me to the idea: maybe I can make funnier talks by simply basing my research on things that are inherently funny? I mean, you try taking How a Clebsch-Gordan Transform Helps to Solve the Heisenberg Hidden Subgroup Problem<\/a> and making a funny talk! On the other hand it is, without a question, nearly impossible to give a talk about Time Travel<\/a> without (purposefully or not) uttering really awesome (and well timed) jokes.
\n
\nActually I have a history for thinking that humor might be a decent indicator of good research or at least good problem solving (and not just a source of funny talks.) While a graduate student at Berkeley I participated in a San Francisco version of The Game<\/a> (Fobik: there is a clue on these pages<\/a>.) Basically this was a multihour (read: all night) puzzle hunt spread around the San Francisco bay area. The basic idea was that at each location there was a puzzle of some sort that you had to solve which would tell you the next location in the game. Imagine hundreds of geeks (including a world puzzle champion who was in my class at Caltech, #yeahrightlikeweweregoingtowin) piled into vans and cars racing from location to location, piling out of the car only to then sit around trying to solve a hard puzzle of some sort. Good stuff.
\nWhat does this have to do with humor and research? Well during this game I noticed something kind of interesting. Inevitably we would initially start working on the puzzle and someone would say something completely ridiculous. Like “I bet this puzzle is using flag semaphore<\/a>!” Invariably, we would all laugh…yeah, right, like they would use semaphore in a puzzle involving chess. Then we would work for a while on the puzzle until someone had the audacity to think, “hey maybe it really does use semaphore.” And lo and behold, yeah that was the key to cracking the puzzle. This didn’t just happen once during “the game” but happened repeatedly (and not surprisingly as we got more tired, things got funnier, and we began to realize that the crazy funny idea we had right off the bat wasn’t something to laugh at, but was something to actually try!) Every time I’m trying to solve a problem these days, I often think, “what would be a funny solution?”
\nBut I wonder if this solution method (“solution by LOL?” “SoLOLution?”) can’t be extended to a method for theory research. Think about a subject area and then think of the funniest result you could derive in this area. “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” And then instead of just laughing at the conjecture, maybe you should actually check and see if your humor is actually well tuned to the universe. I mean, if god is a comedian (see Voltaire<\/a>), then wouldn’t he have a special spot in his heart for funny research? The optimizer, in a previous blog post, has discussed sidesplitting proofs<\/a>. So at least we know that in computer science the universe appears to favor humor. But what about in other fields? Economics (okay, maybe the whole thing is a joke?), physics (maybe the universe really is made up of spherical cows<\/a>), mathematics (there is nothing funny about starting a paper with “Let x be…”), or biology (I mean molecular biologists already overuse the word “assay.” Face it, that’s a funny word to a ten year old boy.) Maybe the reason scientists are so dull<\/a> is that they we have gotten away from the ultimate hilarity of the world (okay the conjecture that the universe is ultimately simply a joke isn’t very funny, especially if you are Rosencrantz<\/a> (but not, strangely, if you are Guildenstern.))
\nSo today, instead of finishing the paper I should be working on, maybe I’ll go browse the web for really bad jokes, apply them to quantum computing, and see what happens. Jokes involving superposition, entanglement and cats don’t seem to get many laughs. But maybe I can find something funny about the Hidden Subpoop Problem?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the optimizer’s blog, quantum computing’s younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Humor as a Guide to Research”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,30,34,46,50,53,70,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-funny-ha-ha","category-go-ahead-waste-your-time","category-neologista","category-off-the-deep-end","category-physics","category-science","category-self-meet-center-center-meet-self"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}